Today, an increasing number of services are implemented by use of different types of physical authentication devices, e.g. smartcards or access control cards. Recently, various solutions have also been put forward, which render it possible to emulate such physical authentication devices in for example a mobile telephone. Thus, the mobile telephone can replace one or more of the physical authentication devices.
US 2011/0276961 discloses a method for installing a non-smart-card-related application on a Near Field Communication (NFC) enabled device, such as an NFC-enabled mobile phone. If the NFC-enabled device is unable to identify or find the target application associated with a Target Identifier (Target ID) in a received Generic Control record, a look-up table in which Target IDs are associated with target URIs from which installation files for the target applications of the Target IDs can be downloaded is used to retrieve the target URI of the Target ID in the received Generic Control record. One or several installation files for the target application is then downloaded from the retrieved target URI, whereupon the target application of the Target ID in the received Generic Control record is installed on the NFC-enabled device using the downloaded installation file(s).
US 2013/0019323 presents a method, performed in a secure element, which is arranged to enable user applications of the secure element to verify authenticity of incoming user application commands. The method involves: receiving a command from a secure element reader for a user application on the secure element, the command including an application identifier of the user application; determining whether there is a matching user application in the secure element; invoking the matching user application; and establishing, when there is an absence of any matching user applications, a communication channel with a remote application manager server and sending an absent user application message to the application manager server indicating that the user application has been requested on the secure element. A corresponding secure element, method for an application manager server and application manager server are also presented.
US 2013/0124349 describes a solution for utilizing and provisioning an aggregated soft card, wherein a request for an aggregated soft card from a mobile device is received, which aggregated soft card includes a primary component soft card and at least one secondary component soft card. Component soft card data associated with each of the primary component soft card and the at least one secondary component soft card are requested from a plurality of issuing system servers. Further, aggregated soft card data are generated by establishing a link among the component soft card data received from the plurality of issuing system servers and sending the aggregated soft card data to the mobile device.
Consequently, as stated initially, it is possible to emulate physical authentication devices in mobile devices, such as smart-phones. However, there is yet no straightforward solution to find the appropriate software for emulating a particular physical authentication device in a given mobile device. On the contrary, it is typically very complex to execute this task successfully.